Swarm robots help quadrotor land

Do you love robots, especially in science fiction movies where they swarm all over the place like cockroaches, seemingly in an orderly form of anarchy. Well, it is more real than you imagine as you can see from the robot army above. Researchers over at the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab decided to put their programming genius to good use, utilizing tiny Khepera robots and a quadrotor.

Ted Macdonald and his colleagues managed to teach previously taught these diminutive rolling bots to spell out the lab’s acronym, GRITS. Well, that was fun but how about achieving something new? This caused his team to program the robots to actually scurry all over the floor in order to form a mobile landing platform for the quadrotor.

The Khepera robots will follow an assigned leader robot and form different formations as and when required. Bear in mind, they do not communicate with one another, but rather, will rely on algorithms so that they are capable of being aware of where their fellow robots are positioned. When the number of robots become higher, obviously the entire exercise gets more computationally intensive.